In 1890 the British Library acquired a set of papyri dating from the first century that had been found by archaeologists digging in a rubbish heap near the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. Amid the trove of tax assessments and official records was a papyrus with a text, known from ancient references and fragments but long believed lost, of what has come to be called the Constitution of Athens, generally attributed to Aristotle. Though the papyrus is hardly complete and has many contested passages, it offers an extensive history of Athenian political development and details Athens’ political structure during the fourth century bc. Suddenly, the institutional configuration of the first democracy became available.
Previously, Athenian democracy had largely been seen as a regime in which the people (dêmos) had power (kratos) and voted in an assembly (ecclesia) where the majority determined the laws and policies for the city. Until the discovery of the papyrus, those writing about ancient Athens relied on the surviving literary works of ancient historians, orators, and philosophers and the comedies of Aristophanes for their depictions of that regime. These texts offered a narrow picture of Athens, largely as a city in which the dêmos (denigrated as the “many,” the “poor,” the “mob”) ruled. Later writers used Athenian democracy either as a warning about the dangers of popular rule or as a splendid model of a sovereign people ruling freely and equally over themselves. William Mitford, who in the late eighteenth century began to write what became for the English the authoritative history of Greece, found “marks of kindred between Turkish despotism and Athenian democracy.” Daniel Webster, speaking in the U.S. Congress in the 1820s, asked, “This free form of government, this popular assembly, the common council held for the common good—where have we contemplated its earliest models?” The answer he gives to his rhetorical question: ancient Athens.
The story I will tell is of the reversal in both England and America of the attitude toward Athenian democracy as a regime to be excoriated into one worthy of admiration and emulation. The discovery of the Constitution of Athens, however, allows us to look beyond the Athenian democracy that existed in the political imagination of earlier authors. It offers specifics about the first democracy that went far beyond the etymology of the word democracy. Scholars with an interest in ancient history began to learn about the complex institutions of this regime: the elaborate procedures for identifying who could be counted as a citizen and therefore allowed to vote in the ecclesia; who by a process of sortition filled numerous administrative offices; how the five hundred members of the administrative council (boulê) were chosen by lot, how these officers dined together, and how they determined the agenda for the ecclesia. These facts, and many more, can now inform our understanding of the intricate practices involved in maintaining the self-governing polity of ancient Athenian democracy. The detailed practices of Athenian democracy reveal the complex tensions existing within regimes that aspire to instantiate the democratic principles of freedom, equality, and participation.